A family meeting against all odds

John Howard treasures the memory of his father and grandfather, Anzacs both, Roy Masters reports.

The neat hand-written entry for August 30, 1918, in the war diary of Lyall Falconer Howard reads simply: "Met dad at Clery."

Lyall was 22, an Australian soldier on the Western Front, the eldest of the nine children of Walter Howard, who had enlisted from Sydney late in World War I, aged 44.

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Against all odds, their paths crossed at Clery, a village in France, during the massive troop movements on the eve of the Battle of Mont St Quentin.

The extraordinary meeting of these two soldiers, father and son, would have been lost, along with the millions of lives from that terrible war, except that Lyall and Walter were the father and grandfather of Prime Minister John Howard.

Mr Howard, who has walked the battlefields of France and Belgium retracing the steps of his father and grandfather, describes it as one of the great family stories.

"There's just this pithy or laconic entry in the diary," Mr Howard said. "It's just so Australian - 'Met dad at Clery'."

The diary, now in the possession of Mr Howard's eldest brother, also named Walter, is the only record of the two men together in wartime. There are no photographs of Walter, and none of the two together.

Nor does Mr Howard recall having a photo of himself and his father. But he has precious memories.

"I remember the last Anzac Day he was alive," he said. "I was in fourth year at Canterbury High, and I still see him sitting on the couch at our home in Earlwood after the march.

"He gave me a description of an officer who had been on the front and was coming to the end of his tour of duty, and Dad was given the job of leading him back through the trenches so he could get back to the French coast and to England. Some shells started falling and the bloke said, 'God, I've been here for three years and survived, and now I'm going to get killed on the day I'm going home'."

A member of the 3rd Pioneer Battalion, Lyall Howard enlisted in 1916. His three-word diary entry for the entire period from March 30 to May 10, 1918, reads: "Very warm corner."

Mr Howard says: "They didn't verbalise their experience in the way men do now. It's one of the big changes in Aussie blokes. I think it's a good thing. They don't bottle it all up, but they did in those days.

"Dad had gone through all that and was back at age 23. This is what is so terrible when you go to these war cemeteries. You see all these young ages, 19, 20, 23, 24. It makes you weep.

"They were all so young. It's just terrible. It seems such a terrible waste when you read about this attrition principle."

Walter Howard enlisted after two referendums had failed to introduce conscription, even lying about his age in order to join his son. "It was pretty hairy stuff, considering your eldest son is at the war and you're leaving your wife and eight kids," Mr Howard says.

Asked how he saw his own role in committing Australian troops to Iraq, Mr Howard was silent for a long time.

Finally, he said: "If we'd had television in 1914, World War I would have ended after the first great battle.

"The slaughter... the death rate in those battles was terrible. I mean, we lost 60,000 men out of a male population of fewer than 2.5 million."

Three days after meeting his son, Walter was seriously wounded in the stomach during the battle of Mont St Quentin, an outstanding Australian victory which helped end the war.

"Family folklore is that he was actually treated and saved by an American doctor," Mr Howard said.

"I can remember Dad talking very briefly when I was about 12 or 13, just saying how he'd met his father on the front and how he'd visited him in hospital in England."

After the war, the two ran a service station at Earlwood together.

Mr Howard's father died in 1955, aged 59. Walter lived to 76, dying in 1948.